As President Barack Obama prepares for his second term, he faces
a number of lingering problems overseas—problems that, notwithstanding his
campaign speeches, were not solved in his first term.

TerrorismLet’s begin where the president achieved his greatest foreign-policy triumph:
the strike on Osama bin Laden. Nineteen months later, it seems the president has
drawn the wrong lessons from the bin Laden takedown. If the 2012 campaign
narrative was any indication, the president believes the killing of bin Laden
marked the beginning of the end of the fight against al Qaeda. After all, the
president has repeatedly said, “the tide of war is receding” and “al
Qaeda is on the run.”

In truth, just as the death of Stalin
didn’t end the Cold War, the death of bin Laden didn’t clear the breeding
grounds of terror. That should be abundantly clear from what’s happening in
Mali, Nigeria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Iraq. In these places, al Qaeda and
its partners are flexing their muscles—carving out a state within a state in
Mali, launching hundreds of bloody attacks in Nigeria, carrying out
sophisticated assassinations in Libya, recruiting dozens of Americans to fight
in Somalia, claiming vast swaths of Yemen and making a dramatic comeback in
Iraq.

“The cancer has metastasized to other parts of the global body,” as Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta explains. “If we turn away from these critical regions of
the world, we risk undoing the significant gains [we] have made. That would
make us all less safe over the long-term.”Yes, “bin Laden is dead and GM is alive,”
as the vice president reminded America during the campaign. But “bin
Ladenism”—the movement inspired by the author of 9/11—is anything but dead. As
the 9/11 Commission warned in 2004, jihadist terrorism “will menace Americans
and American interests long after Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are killed or
captured.” This reality cannot be changed by campaign slogans. The
struggle against jihadism will be measured in decades, not election cycles.

Tactics vs. StrategyThe president’s celebrated drone war is another first-term initiative that
promises to cause second-term headaches. To be sure, the drone war has scored
important successes, including taking outal Qaeda’s Abu Yahya al-Libi and Anwar
al-Awlaki; striking Haqqani and Taliban forces in the field; and eliminating as
many as 2,769 militants in Pakistan alone. However,
the drone war has major down sides.

First, it’s a tactic masquerading as a strategy,
and at some point the Obama White House will have to recognize this.

Moreover, what looks like an
essential national-security tool to Americans appears very different to
international observers. “In 17 of 20 countries,” a recent Pew
survey found, “more than half disapprove of U.S. drone attacks
targeting extremist leaders and groups.” The drone war exposes the U.S. to
significant international human rights challenges. A U.N. human rights official
recently announced plans to create an investigation unit within the Human Rights
Council to look at civilian casualties from drone strikes, and the council has noted that “targeted killing is only lawful when the
target is a ‘combatant’ or ‘fighter.’”

Critics of the drone war would argue
it has not always met that standard. The use of drones
to cripple al-Awlaki’s Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda, for instance,
killed dozens of other people, many of them apparently not affiliated with
al-Qaeda. The Brookings Institution estimates that some 450 nonmilitants may have been killed in drone attacks targeting
Pakistani militants.

This is not an argument for international
watchdogs tying America down. The UN secretariat may
refuse to recognize America’s special role, but by turning to Washington
whenever sea lanes are blocked, natural disasters wreak havoc, genocide is let
loose or vital resources are threatened, it is tacitly conceding that the
United States is, well, special. Washington has every right to target
those who are trying to kill Americans. But
the brewing international backlash against the drone war reminds us that means
and methods matter as much as ends.

Leading from BehindThe Obama administration was mindful of this means-and-ends balancing act
during the NATO operation in Libya—perhaps too mindful. It even came up with a
way of describing America’s new approach to intervening in international hot
spots. But “leading
from behind” sounded better on paper than it worked out in practice. In
Libya, “leading from behind” translated into a war
with an expiration date: When NATO asked Washington to extend air operations at
one critical point in the mission, a NATO
official took pains to emphasize that the
extension of U.S. air power, incredibly, “expires on Monday.”

As a result of this lead-from-behind approach, NATO was frayed and almost failed. NATO’s after-action
reports indicate that with America at the rear, the alliance was
woefully lacking in munitions, targeting and jamming capabilities, mid-air
refueling planes, reconnaissance platforms, drones, and command-and-control
assets—just about everything needed to conduct a 21st-century air
war. To be sure, Qaddafi is gone, but Libya is a mess,
as evidenced by the deadly attacks on the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, the
power of militias and the weakness of the transitional government.

Speaking
of messes, Syria is on fire. And the world is waiting on Washington to lead in
some direction. Without American leadership, Syria may become this president’s
Rwanda. Because of the president’s inaction, it is already his Bosnia.

NATO governments and other members of the nation-building
coalition in Afghanistan are following Washington’s lead and heading
for the exits. If the administration sticks to its campaign pledge of “focusing
on nation-building here at home” and withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2014, it
is difficult to imagine Kabul holding back a resurgent Taliban—and impossible
to imagine the U.S. military keeping up the pressure on Pakistan, the
wellspring of Taliban
terror.

Iraq offers a grim
preview of what lies ahead for Afghanistan. A year after pulling out of Iraq, the
situation is worse than it was when U.S. troops were there. “Iraqi efforts to
combat terrorist groups have been negatively affected by the U.S. pullout,” a
spokesman for Iraq’s counterterror services reports. For instance, before the
departure of U.S. forces in December 2011, al Qaeda’s branch in Iraq (AQI) had
been decimated. But today, AQI numbers 2,500 fighters, has training camps in
western Iraq, and is carrying out 140 attacks per week.

This was avoidable. As Frederick
Kagan, one of the architects of the surge, explains, Pentagon and State Department officials wanted to keep
more than 20,000 U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011. But the White House proposed a
residual force of just 3,000 troops. When Baghdad balked, as Kagan
reports, the White House “decided instead to withdraw all U.S. troops from
Iraq…despite the fact that no military commander supported the notion that such
a course of action could secure U.S. interests.”

The
payoff: Washington has no leverage with Baghdad; Iraq is scarred by renewed sectarian
war; parts of
Iraq are safe havens for AQI; and Iran is moving arms and fighters into Syria via
Iraq.

Autocrats and AtomsTo his credit, the president built an international-sanctions coalition to force
Iran to give up its nuclear program. However, the Congressional Research
Service recently concluded, “The principal objective of international
sanctions—to compel Iran to verifiably confine its nuclear program to purely
peaceful uses—has not been achieved to date.”

To be successful, international sanctions against Iran must be more than an end
in and of themselves.

Likewise, the president
has to recognize that a successful Russia policy has to deliver more than slogans
and summits. Again, summits are a means to an end, not an end in and of
themselves. The president’s “Russian Reset” improved neither America’s global
position nor America’s relations with Russia.Recall that in order toink a questionable arms control treaty
with Russia, the president upended NATO’s missile-defense plans in Europe and pulled
the rug out from under Poland and the Czech Republic. Worried about Iran’s
nukes, Europe had agreed to a NATO-wide missile defense system during the Bush
administration. Obama’s reversal pleased the Russians, but it infuriated the
Poles and Czechs. A Polish defense official called the decision “catastrophic.”
The Czech Republic rejected Washington’s revised plans as “a consolation
prize.”

The payoff of the Russian Reset:
Vladimir Putin plans to deploy 2,300 new tanks, 600 new warplanes, 400 new ICBMs and 28 new subs
(all in the next 10 years); launched Russia’s largest nuclear war
games since the collapse of the Soviet Union;
withdrew from the Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction program; sent Russian
bombers buzzing Baltic and North American airspace; blocked international
action in Syria; and unilaterally claimed vast stretches of the Arctic.

Early in his first term, Obama
envisioned “spheres of cooperation” between China and America. Beijing does not
share the president’s vision. China
unilaterally claims a vast swath of the South China Sea, including Japanese and
Philippine territory—and routinely violates their waters and airspace. As if to underscore its seriousness, China boosted military spending by 11 percent this year, capping double-digit
increases in nine of the past 10 years. According to the Pentagon’s latest
report on China’s military power, Beijing is pouring increasing sums into
cruise missiles, anti-ship ballistic missiles, counter-space weapons, bomber upgrades
and submarines—assets focused on countering American power.

This helps explain another
administration slogan. In 2009, Obama declared
that “the United States does not seek to contain China.” But by 2011, he was
unveiling his “Pacific Pivot” aimed at, well, containing China. Although a
renewed focus on security in the Pacific is needed—Panetta says of Northeast
Asia, “We’re within an inch of
war almost every day in that part of the world”—one wonders how effective the “Pacific
Pivot” will be given the administration’s defense cuts. Recall
that the Pentagon was the first place the
president turned when the debt crisis emerged. That led to $487
billion in cuts, including cuts to the Air Force of
286 planes, cuts in the number of surface combatants, cuts to the active-duty
Army from 570,000 soldiers to 490,000, cuts to the Marines from 202,000 to
182,000, cuts
in F-35s, F/A-18s, UH-60 helicopters, KC-46
refuelers, carriers and submarines. All of these cuts come before the looming sequestration cuts. The result of this shrinking military is an America with slower reflexes, a shorter reach and a smaller role in
the world.

The “receding
tide of war,” “leading from behind,” “nation-building at home,” the “Russian
Reset,” the “Pacific Pivot”—these words may make for effective rhetoric. But
words don’t defend the national interest.

*Dowd is a senior fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes The Dowd Report, a monthly review of international events and their impact on U.S. national security.